It has been well recognized within the art as to the desirability of sealing the bottoms of exterior doors against weather including elemental precipitation and dirt, snow, moisture and the like. To accomplish this, the bottoms of the doors have been adapted to include a pair of resilient sealing strips which are sealingly engageable with the thresholds of the doors as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,386,482 (Quinif), 4,034,511 (Bursk) and 3,521,404 (Hager et al.), or a single resilient sealing strip as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,750,333 (Vance), 3,153,817 (Pease, Jr.) and 2,089,669 (Shadford) and French Application No. 2,405,351 (Monnier et al.). Also, exterior doors have included weather sealing strips having an actuator element adapted to engage the thresholds to provide a double seal as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,448,543 (Multer). However, several limitations and problems have been associated with such assemblies, principal of which is that the sealing strips wear out prematurely because in order to accomplish sealing the strips must rub or drag across the thresholds. This causes the sealing strips to eventually wear to the point that a complete seal is not accomplished. Also, because sealing is depended upon dragging the sealing strip across the threshold or dragging the door across the sealing strip, wearing of the threshold or lodging of debris caused by persons traveling across it over time materially affects the quality of the seal. Further, the door must be precision hung or the bottom tapered to permit compressing of the sealing strip to accomplish sealing. Thus, when conventional sealing assemblies are initially installed, the door is usually hard to open and close and only after repeated use does it begin to require less effort. This reduction in effort, however, is because of the wearing of the seal or the reduction in the resilience of the sealing strips which affects the sealing quality.
In addition to the problems associted with the use of the above assemblies, prior sealing assemblies are either difficult to install or difficult to replace once the sealing strips have become warn, specifically, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,089,669 (Shadford) where the bottom of the door must first be tapered to provide for the application of the sealing member. Also, most of the assemblies discussed above are not readily adaptable to use in the after market because of the complexity of the assembly and the difficulty associated with its installation.